We started trout-fishing together, the four of us, in 1947 while we were students at Bellevue Junior High School in Syracuse. In those early days we used the most primitive of methods – feeling about under the banks with our hands – and we kept and ate everything we caught. Before long we moved up to worms on snelled hooks, then spinning rods and lures, and finally fly fishing. And I don’t know that any of us has kept a fish in years.

The core of the Ozarks, the St. Francois Mountains, is igneous and inexpressibly old; try to wrap your mind around 1.5 billion years. But here just north of the Arkansas border we’re surrounded by beds and cliffs of massive limestone. The river at the foot of the hill is sweet water, fed by cold springs gushing out of the rock. It flows here through one section of the Mark Twain National Forest, which is scattered in large pieces all over southern MIssouri. One paddlers’ guide says the river has “some of the best white whitewater in the Missouri Ozarks,” dropping between seven and ten feet per mile. Yesterday it looked as though half the paddlers of Missouri were out to enjoy it. And because of its coldwater sources, it has excellent trophy trout fishing, as well.

It was a long drive down here from north of St. Louis, so when we stopped to buy our fishing licenses at a Walmart in the city of Rolla, I picked up the local paper to read in the back seat. Cost me a buck; weekend edition, the cashier explained. I started reading. After about a minute I remembered Bobby Kennedy’s alleged nomination of the Manchester Union Leader as the world’s worst newspaper. I’ve got another contender for the distinction, though Bobby’s opinion was based on editorial policy and slanted news, and mine on no editorial and no news – unless you count preparations for a reduced Fourth of July fireworks display and a local retired schoolteacher reaching the age of 104. I left it in a Rolla barbecue joint for some other avid reader.

We’ve been staying at Twin Bridges, a commercial campground located strategically at a road junction and bridges over the river about where it becomes easily navigable by canoes and kayaks. There were tents, SUVs, and barbecues all over the place Saturday and Sunday. The four of us stayed in an elderly single-wide, a wonderful haven of icy air conditioning and hot showers in the muggy 85-degree heat. As we ate breakfast in the little dining pavilion next to our camp, a troop of burly Boy Scouts joined us (luckily, just after we’d gone through the buffet). They wore plastic bear-tooth necklaces, and their T-shirts read, “No one camps more than 74!”

Dick and I had paddled together on an Arctic river in 1993, so we decided to reprise our successful partnership. We all four set off downriver after breakfast on Sunday.

The river was not quite the piece of cake I’d imagined. Small to begin with, it divided frequently around gravel bar islands. Picking the channel with the most water was tricky. Then there was the additional excitement of overhanging branches and whole tree trunks. Sweepers, they’re called, and they can do a lot of damage in almost no time: You get entangled in one, you see, but your canoe, in the current, keeps going. We muddled through, and shortly the spring-fed river broadened and carried us gently through a tree-shrouded canyon of spectacular limestone cliffs on both sides. Buzzards hovered suggestively overhead, looping around on the morning thermals.

Our canoes leapfrogged as one or the other stopped to fish. There were dozens more on the river, floating down the 15 miles to the designated takeout. When Dick and I stopped to eat our bag lunches, I looked upstream and spotted the reddish-brown head of a white-tailed doe swimming the river. I kept looking for her fawn, a little worried about the kid in the rapids, but there was none; she must have lost it. About a minute later, a mountainous young lady drifted past in a ride-on-top kayak, exposing square yards of flesh to the blistering sun and paddling listlessly. I asked if she’d seen the deer, and got an enthusiastic and beautifully Southern recitation of her entire experience, thought processes, and conclusions that continued even after she’d passed out of earshot.

Paradisiacal as the valley seemed, it wasn’t the Garden of Eden. There was a lot of high-bush poison ivy around, and stinging nettles that stayed with us long after they got us. I’d found a couple of Lone Star ticks on me the night before, so naturally I itched every time I thought of them. The schools of trophy trout we’d been expecting were apparently lying doggo; but I did manage to land a bluegill, while Herb got a beautiful smallmouth and Pete and Dick several chubs.

We successfully ran a small drop called the Falls, whose name had had me worried. But there wasn’t much to it. Then we talked with another buxom person who announced that she’d spilled and “sacrificed to the river gods” two umbrellas, two lawn chairs, and some other stuff. We paddled on down the last couple of miles in relatively flat water, took out, and waited for our pals. And waited. They arrived some time later, a bit subdued, rather wet, and missing two nice fly rods. We, too, had given a sacrifice to the river gods.